How do you interact with your working community? What could you do differently to enhance the spirits of your working place? Is there someone in your working community who brings positive energy to you; why is that? Reflect on the quality of the interaction in the light of where and why is the interaction fruitful to you to lift up your working spirit.
The interaction with my working community is with my students, my boses and my collegue Marina (who is also an Italian teacher). The interaction with them is by phone, emails and social networks such facebook, linkedin and skype. I work in Community Colleges (in Finnish Kansalaisopisto) so the spirit is to give our customers a learning and relaxing enviroment while following their passions. I am an Italian teacher and I lead courses for those who are going to Italy (mostly for vacation) but also for those who wants to learn the language for other reasons (family member, passion for Italian culture or because they can speak already Spanish).
My boses are quite open minded we are basically free to express our ideas and - in my case - propose new courses. There is not s specific person who does bring positive energy: I would say that I got that from the group in general. Students are there cause they want to learn Italian so they actively partecipate to the lessons: this give me positive energy that I give back to them as a mirror. Sometimes I face difficult groups: with them it is harder than usually is but I try my best to give them anyway a good service. In those cases I share my feelings with my only collegue, Marina, by phone. I travel quite a lot and so is she, so when we want to give each other support, we call during this long trips. We could talk over an hour! We share the difficulties with a specific group and try to give each other support and solutions.
I would say that my interaction has been good until now but lately I have felt that I would need to partecipate more to the activities of the schools: it seems to me that I am quite separate to the general philosophy of a specific organization, instead would be nice to help to organize and bring new ideas. I would like to have possibility to build some projects that involves students but most of the time the schools they do not have enought financial possibilities. I would say that going to work is refreshing for me: the interaction with the students is extremely positive even sometimes (for my personal reasons) I am going to work that I am already tired.
It would be nice to have stronger interaction with my boses or from those who have longer experience in teaching than me: it would be nice to organize not only language courses but also courses related to cultures and communication in foreigner country. Maybe one day...who knows?
You had some nice ideas and I think I can relate to you, since you don't have that many colleagues. It's great that you have found your niche (or do you feel you're in the place you want to be?) -I mean for a foreigner, it can be very hard to find a meaningful job, and even for us Finns likewise.
RispondiEliminaThis is not the main topic, but it would be interesting to hear what kind of difficulties you face at work? It sounds like you are good friends with another teacher, Marina.
Maarit
Hi Maarit! The difficulties with my students are quit practcal. since they are studying Italian as an hobby they don´t take seriously the whole thing: of course this is not valid for all of them but for most of it yes. This sometimes make my motivation going down ("why I do this?")and that´s why I share with my collegues Marina.
RispondiEliminaThe other difficulties is that it takes time to learn a language: students not always come to the Italian class with that idea on mind. They just want to learn how to order a beer in Italian but only few of them are willing to learn deeply the language.